Adding medical cannabis to a conventional treatment regimen significantly, and quickly, improved outcomes for people suffering with fibromyalgia-related lower back pain, according to newly published research in the journal "Clinical and Experimental Rheumatology."

Researchers with Hasharon Hospital and Kaplan Medical Center in Israel treated thirty-one patients for three months with the standard analgesic cocktail of oxycodone, naloxone hydrochloride and duloxetine. They then added medical cannabis to the treatment for six additional months.

The standard treatments yielded modest improvements in the patients’ pain and lower back range of motion through the beginning of the study. The addition of medical cannabis, however, led to notable improvements over the course of three months, and continued improvements for the duration of the 6-month period of the combined therapy regimen.

The researchers caution that because relatively small number of patients involved in the study, further clinical trials will be necessary to say whether all fibromyalgia sufferers would benefit from adding medical cannabis to their treatments. The results were published online October 30, 2018, and will appear in print in a future edition of "Clinical and Experimental Rheumatology."

See a summary of the paper on the National Institutes of Health online library page here.